The field of the present invention is packaging mechanisms for tape cassettes.
Magnetic tape for both audio and visual devices has come to be packaged in standardized tape cassettes. Common today are audio cassettes and 3/4 inch and 1 inch video cassettes. With audio cassettes, and to a lesser extent video cassettes, expensive packaging has been employed to enclose and protect such devices. In the case of audio cassettes, the rigid plastic boxes now account for as much as 20% of the cost of the packaged product. A need has developed for less expensive packaging for such devices.
In an effort to reduce the cost of packaging of such devices, sleeves of cardboard or other inexpensive material have been developed for packaging the tape cassettes. These sleeves closely fit the standardized cassettes and extend along the longest dimension of the cassette with openings at either end. The sleeves have two opposed wide sides and two opposed narrow sides so as to conform to the general shape of such cassettes. Conveniently they come with each of two adjacent sides, one wide side and one narrow side, extending in substantially the same planes. Thus, the sleeves come completely collapsed along two of four folds with the other folds being prescored to inherently achieve a rectangular cross section when the folded edges are squeezed toward one another.
With such sleeves, actual cost savings are fully realized only if the sleeves can be automatically expanded to the rectangular cross section and positioned over the cassette. The nonrectangular configuration of the sleeves when supplied and the close fit of the sleeves over the cassette complicate automation of this packaging.